This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Certain abbreviations that may be found in the description and/or in the Figures are herewith defined as follows:                UE user equipment        HO handover        eNB enhanced NodeB        MTC machine type communication        RRC radio resource control        LTE long term evolution, a.k.a. E-UTRA        MME mobility management entity        SGW serving gateway        
The mobility of user equipment in terms of handover or cell reselection can be network controlled or user equipment controlled. In a network controlled mobility mode, network devices such as the radio base station (RBS, eNB) and/or a radio network controller (RNC) control moving the user equipment from one cell to another. The network controlled mobility mode is typically user equipment assisted as the user equipment measures the signal strengths of neighboring cells, and provides measurement reports to the network. In view of these reports the network device determines whether a handover should be executed.
In a user equipment controlled mobility mode, the user equipment may autonomously perform cell reselection. For example the user equipment is free to select a cell to move to in consideration of measurements of signals from multiple cells potentially including selection criteria and thresholds. The criteria and thresholds′can be provided by the network.
Wireless communication systems can deploy both network controlled mobility and user equipment controlled mobility solutions. In LTE for example, radio resource control (RRC) protocol is modeled with two states—RRC_IDLE and RRC_CONNECTED. In the RRC_IDLE state the user equipment controlled mobility is implemented in which the user equipment performs the measurements and the cell reselection. In the RRC_CONNECTED state, the network controlled mobility is implemented in which the network is in control of when the handover and cell reselection for the user equipment occurs.
The exemplary embodiments of the invention provide novel operations which work to achieve advantages including at least a minimizing of signaling overhead and user equipment power consumption such as in user equipment controlled mobility mode.